Visiting Alice’s World on the Resident Evil: Retribution Set

You enter a typical soundstage. It’s all cables and beams, wood and iron. Crew members are layered in sweaters and long pants to fight off the chill inside. The brave ones wear shorts. At the soundstage’s entrance is a Christmas tree; its yuletide glow is tarnished by the fake corpse of an Umbrella Corporation soldier propped up in a chair next to it. Behind him, a pane of glass splattered with blood.

Welcome to Camp Evil.

Weaving in an out of the gaffers, grips and production assistants, you try not to trip yourself on the minefield of apple boxes, power strips and black cables stretching out into the shadows. There’s a gigantic set to the left. White pillars stretching to the ceiling and pristine, glossy white floor tiles being dismantled. Crew members work at a hurried pace to bring the set down by the end of the day. If one were to set up a camera and shoot this process with time lapse photography, the playback would be akin to watching ants working over a fresh carcass, stripping meat from a bone.

This set is just the front half of the soundstage. The remaining square acres are a different story, hell, different environment entirely. It’s a set built to impress.

What stretches out before you is a white, icy landscape. Fake snow drifts lazily to the ground. Ahead, lying on its side like a wounded animal is some sort of all-terrain vehicle. And jutting out of the “ice” from below is a submarine conning tower, Umbrella logo emblazoned on the side.

Jill Valentine exits the sub with Ada Wong, held captive by the long-thought-dead Rain. They stand side by side, facing off  and you will come to see later in the day when the crew gets more coverage of the scene  with Alice, Leon Kennedy and Luther West, the passengers of the all-terrain vehicle.

Alice stares down her adversaries. “Just the two of you?” she asks. Rain, holding Ada at gunpoint, uses her free hand to pull a fancy hypodermic needle out of her belt. She injects the needle’s fluid into her neck.

Jill watches this procedure, looks back confidently to Alice and responds, “It will be enough.”

With that, Rain knocks Ada out with a blow to the back of the head. Jill sprints into action, charging at Alice. And thus begins another all-out brawl between good and evil in a world overrun by the undead in Resident Evil: Retribution, slated to open in 2D and 3D on September 14 from Screen Gems.